The overall objective of this investigation is to develop methods of estimating ventilation requirements for controlling the toxicity and explosion hazards resulting from volatile release from surface coatings. An experimental method has been developed to measure the loss rates of individual coating solvents from the surface of small substrate samples under conditions of controlled air velocity, temperature humidity and coating thickness. Experiments using gloss enamel on an aluminum substrate have shown that increased air temperature (15-40 degrees C) increased the total rates of solvent loss while time to dryness was not effected. Increased air velocity (1.4-20.1 cm/s) produced higher initial loss rates and decreased time to dryness. Humidity (20-49% RH) had no discernible effect on loss of organic solvents.